Acclaim

There was a world in Timothy’s drawer, and he didn’t know what to do with it. It had grown there, very slowly, on a ragged sock with red stripes on the ankle. He used to wear it during soccer practice, as one of a pair. He’d worn a hole in it, and his mother had bought more socks, as she often did, and he forgot to throw the sock away. By the time he remembered, by the time he’d run out of clean socks in his drawer, he’d found the red striped sock and the world on it.

Before, when he hadn’t been able to find the red striped sock, he wore a blue striped sock to match, or whatever was available. Flipping around the loose cotton in his drawer, he found the blue striped sock. But he found no world growing on that one.

It may have begun as a stubborn grass stain, some particles of mashed in dirt. Maybe mold or some fungus had taken root in the fibers. Whatever the reason, the world now had stars and a gas nebula, and Timothy saw a little satellite blinking in intervals around a small, sock-shaped planetoid. Timothy did what seemed right to him at the time, as might be expected of a nine-year-old boy.

“Attention, sock!” he yelled into his drawer. “I am Tim Lembke! Acclaim me your deity and I shall be just and loving. Cross my heart and hope to die! My first commandment is, no homework! Homework is lame. Like, really bad. And two, soccer’s lame. You guys can’t have any homework or soccer. You got that?”

Timothy watched the satellite circle once in the shifting nebula. When it returned it blinked in a new pattern, long and short. Timothy would need to consult his Boy Scout handbook, but he wagered it was morse code, or a code of some kind. “Okay, good,” said Timothy. “Let’s talk burnt offerings. I’m thinking deep dish pizza.”

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"All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is for the reason which grows out of my medieval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth."